Abby Leigh

Abby Leigh's work consistently deals with the same themes: the relationship of order and randomness; microcosm and macrocosm; and with what lies beneath the surface, both literally and conceptually.

"Leigh's process begins by beating Dibond aluminum panels with a sledgehammer, covering them with dents and dings.

[3] The resulting paintings "beg for free association," resembling everything from bacteria floating in water or graffiti,[2] and have been compared to Yayoi Kusama's engagement of the infinite and the "visionary abstraction of Arthur Dove.

"[4] In a review of Leigh's sledgehammer paintings, Alfred Mac Adams writes: "unlike banal abstraction this work takes the viewer back to the erotics of landscape, the fetishizing of nature that transforms mountains and trees into voluptuous bodies.

"[6] The contemplative element present in Leigh's work arises from her inquisitive and analytical nature, as well as physical limitations.

She enrolled in drawing classes in the Art Students League in New York, where her teacher, Will Barnet, encouraged her to become a painter.

The unfolding biomorphic flow of these drawings inevitably evokes the introspective surrealism of an artist like Arshile Gorky…"—The Brooklyn Rail[9] "The results resemble…pregnant Robert Ryman canvases that delicately balance the scientific and the artistic"—Artnews[10] "One recalls the anthropometry of Yves Klein, those impressions of nude models involving the breasts, the stomach and the sex of the females, which is to say the seat of vital, autonomous functions which escape direct control by the brain: breathing, digestion and orgasm.

The diffused humanoid vegetal sexuality that Abby Leigh lets us see is also a hymn to love of life through its essentially primary and autonomous energetic impulses: it is the orgasm of nature in its plenitude, the triumph of planetary eros."